Queen of the imperfect body

Wednesday 6 May 2009 10:45 BST

'It's important women design for women': Daniella Helayel at her London Fashion Week catwalk show last night

A little after New Year's Day this year Brazilian designer Daniella Helayel — the fashion brains behind the smash-hit Issa dress — was invited to stay at the Thai villa of Chinese entrepreneur Sir David Tang.

To her surprise, Kate Moss was already ensconced, and the first thing Moss wanted was a good rummage through Helayel's suitcase. "I gave Sir David's wife Lucy one of my kaftan dresses, and Kate was like, 'Oh, my God, I want one too.' She started going through my case looking for stuff ... but the great thing was, she chose one of the cape dresses my grandmother back in Brazil also wears. And my grandmother is 85 years old. Isn't that cool?"

It's a story that encapsulates perfectly Helayel's mission statement — to design clothes that women of every age, shape and size can wear with equal confidence.

And as London Fashion Week parades its usual array of the weird, wonderful and brilliantly unwearable, you can't help but feel it's a radical aim. "Of course I want to make clothes for the gorgeous, the famous and the perfect," she says. "But I also want to make clothes for everyone else, including myself."

Issa fans Madonna, Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley clearly belong in the former category, but it was the repeated endorsement of Helayel's designs by Prince William's girlfriend Kate Middleton that last year sealed Issa's UK success.

When Kate (a size eight to 10) wore a coral pink floor-length Issa gown to a charity boxing ball last summer, Helayel suddenly acquired a new reputation for turning even the Sloaniest, most Laura Ashley-infested wardrobes into something altogether sexier and more stylish. (Helayel is diplomatic when discussing whether Middleton received freebies, but denies that she deliberately targeted her for publicity purposes.) Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie ("super-sweet girls, and turning into quite beautiful women") are also devotees of Issa's grown-up chic.

I meet Helayel at her eccentric Chelsea home — full of deep sofas, unsubtle wall colours and bright ethnic prints — a many-floored townhouse that also serves as a studio for cutting, machining and fitting.

It's just hours before her catwalk show at LFW, but the house is unnervingly calm. The models she will use are all size eight or 10, though she sells dresses in sizes up to 16 and makes a 20 for her make-up artist Pat McGrath..

Johansson wears a size six, but there are no Issa dresses in the infamous size zero. "I don't like to see girls as skinny as a ghost, and we deliberately cast girls with boobs because my dresses don't hang so well on the very flat- chested."

This year's show will feature the trademark knee-length frocks in big bold colours — pillar-box red; eye-watering Matisse-blue — that flatter a curvy shape and hide those small imperfections that no one, not even Scarlett, wants to advertise. It will also feature big, new, Spanx-like belts to create a deceptively flat stomach.

"We all have anxieties about our bodies," Helayel says. "It is important, I think, that women design for women. In the end, men fantasise so much about women, they put them so high on a pedestal, that they forget about the little things. Like the little bit of fat under the arm" She squeezes small pieces of flesh under her bicep and around her cleavage. "Or the one or two centimetres of really crucial cutting that hides some spot that should not be shown. These are the little details that a woman will know about and a man doesn't.

"For me, it is all about making women feel comfortable and confident when they wear my clothes." Yet she was not always so confident herself. Helayel grew up in the city of Niteroi, few miles from Rio de Janeiro; and Rio, of course, is the world's plastic surgery epicentre, where the industry makes billions each year and celebrities talk openly of their stomach-churning tucks and lifts. At 16, Helayel had a breast reduction operation. "When I was very young, everyone wanted small breasts to be free to wear little T-shirts," she says.

"I had awful posture. I was constantly hunched over, and the operation definitely made me feel better about myself.

They took, like, a kilo off my chest. I've never regretted it." But she was so young, did her parents not mind? Her mother was a teacher and surely used to teenage whims and fads.

" No, no. As long as I felt good, they didn't mind at all. There's more acceptance of plastic surgery in Brazil than there is here. I would have anything done, if it made me feel better. I don't want to look like a plastic doll, and some women out there do. But if you do things in moderation, not in excess, then I wouldn't rule out anything."

She is a size 10 today - and, at five foot four, in tight black pants and figure-hugging white polo neck, undeniably curvy — but still admits to "being forever paranoid about my weight".

Helayel is oddly coy about her age (and about her boyfriend, a Londonbased Swiss man whom she's been seeing for eight months), and describes herself as "forever 25 in my heart and head", though she's clearly in her thirties.

She regularly visits a top dermatologist in an effort to keep major signs of ageing at bay.

"I want to age like Sophia Loren, not like Brigitte Bardot," she shrieks.

"Loren looks so fantastic, and Bardot, who was such a great beauty, has aged naturally and not been very lucky, I think. If plastic and cosmetic surgery is the way to go, for me that is fine." Helayel's approach, then, is not political — she is not designing flattering, wearable clothes for feminist reasons — but practical. She wants women to feel good about themselves no matter what size they are, yet is happy to endorse radical body-shaping techniques.

Hers is a modern, whatever-makes-youhappy, kind of sisterhood: "Everyone wants to feel as though they look nice, don't they?" she says innocently. Yet her attitude towards the fitting of her clothes is inspiring too. At least four, and more often six, women of "normal" size will try on each frock before she's happy with a design. Unlike many peers, she does not fit solely on super-skinny models.

"My idea as a designer is to make your life easier," she says. "Life is already too complicated without clothes being difficult as well." And then she shows me the tallest pair of spiky red heels you ever did see — for a model to wear at tonight's show. Easy, but not that easy.

Helayel is a bag of contradictions, and her clothes something of a paradox. It is, after all, her precise understanding of the imperfect female body, her own included, that make those striking frocks so desirable.